While I agree with most of the criticisms leveled here, I actually loved this film. It does a great job of upending Boetticher's own style from a decade earlier. Rather than a gunslinger that is able to find his way out of every scenario he finds himself in, we are given one that keeps getting caught with his pants down and can't seem to find his way out of conundrums he keeps getting himself into. Maybe when Robert Randolph's character is 25 years younger, this is how he is learning those hard lessons. But I found it rather charming to see a film from the dopey young gunslinger's perspective.
The film worked for me on another level as well. In addition to almost being the flip side of his own 50s westerns, we are given a seriously campy film here. That first shot of the snake just looks so different than the style of the 50s films, and in many ways the film is "what if we took the style of the westerns I made in the 50s, but made them a decade later?" Updated film stocks, completely different tone from the supporting cast, at times it almost felt like Boetticher was making one of his signature westerns but recruited all of the supporting cast from
Easy Rider. Was it so bad it was actually good? To me it definitely felt that way. And I actually preferred it to many of the more renowned revisionist westerns of the late 60s and 70s.
It wasn’t perfect. I didn’t love the shootout sequence, and if it was trying to make a point about how anti-heroic those are in reality, then it works for me. Otherwise it was a bit sloppy. But the final shootout is beautifully done, nihilistic, and especially as
Billy starts justifying his actions and asking his companions to keep in front of him, I felt it was a really good and dark, ominous sign of things to come, socially in America.
I also disagree with the idea that it looked rough? Looked wonderful to me on my plasma, definitely some grainier sequences but I watched the widescreen version and thought it looked beautiful.
